


Theoretical Physics

by Mangokiwitropicalswirl



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M, Post-Episode: s06e03 Triangle
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-15
Updated: 2017-04-15
Packaged: 2018-10-19 09:20:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,140
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10636929
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mangokiwitropicalswirl/pseuds/Mangokiwitropicalswirl





	

It’s not that she doesn’t believe in the possibility, it’s just that it doesn’t matter. 

Past lives are one implausible thing, but parallel universes are another altogether. The thing about theoretical physics is that it’s just that -- theoretical. If multiverse theory is true, every individual choice made by every individual person generates a new reality. Each outcome creates its own timeline. Quanta can exist in two places at once. Light is both a particle and a wave.

There’s a universe she thinks of most, where she married Ethan and is living comfortably in the suburbs with a kid or two, her ova safely unharvested. (She wonders how that Dana deals with the boredom, or if she’s long since stopped asking the hard questions, settled with her lot in life).

There’s a universe where Marcus knocked her up in high school and they ran off together, to her parents’ eternal disappointment. That Dana is working as a waitress or plodding through community college. (She knows this version is ashamed of herself, aware that she could’ve been so much more, but now there are too many choices to undo).

There’s the universe where she stayed in medicine, choosing surgery or pediatrics over pathology. Maybe that Dr. Scully saves lives every day, but is overworked and lonely. 

Or the myriad universes created every time she wanted to leave Mulder and the X Files and actually followed through. The one that first year, after Deep Throat died. The time she stepped away after her coma. The thousand Mondays when it all just seemed too much -- especially after Philadelphia when the snarl of anger in her gut threatened to unleash all her dark and girlish motives.

But what difference does it make that all these universes exist if you can’t interact with them, can’t reach them? You can’t call your alter ego on the phone so she can tell you that the grass is, if not greener, definitely a different shade of dissatisfaction. 

It would be a fundamental law of every world that it’s impenetrable. That the best we could do would be to imagine their existence, or that they imagine ours.

But that’s what Mulder has been insisting, isn’t it? That he had somehow breached a quantum wall and fallen into a world where they were both themselves, but somehow other? But that the outcome of their choices there would impact here? “You were there, Scully, in 1939. You saved the world!”

Now she’s confused.

At least as confused as he had been on all those painkillers. It was painkillers, right?

She thinks back to the hospital, to the bruise on Mulder’s cheek. Once they’d drug him from the water and got him on the Navy chopper back to D.C. General, she had filled in his chart. In another accident report it seems foolish to take seriously, there were her notes detailing his waterlogged rambling. Something about Nazis and a right hook, a wartime weapon and someone who looked like her sporting a knockout -- “pun intended,” he had mumbled incoherently -- red dress. 

She had stood over his bed and waited for him to wake, the day’s worth of panic, of AWACS surveillance and frenzy, sliding off her. Had she kissed Skinner in an elevator? She couldn’t remember. 

How is it Mulder looked so attractive in that flimsy hospital gown? Had he been working out more lately? She had let her eyes linger over his shapely tanned arms and remembered with a flush the way she’d gripped them as he lifted her out of that cavern in Antarctica. She had had to force her gaze to return to the blossoming purple bruise around his left eye socket.

As her hands slide over the steering wheel on her drive home, she recognizes all this musing on the nature of multiverse theory for what it is -- an attempt to distract herself from the hum in the back of her brain, the near-panic that is circling and circling her subconscious. Mulder had said I love you. And she had said, “Oh brother.” 

Playful exasperation has for so long been a default setting between both of them -- more often on her part, but sometimes on his -- that she had skipped straight to it before it dawned on her that he was deadly, tenderly earnest. It didn’t take long. The realization slammed into her with the solidity of a left hook as she walked out the door of his room. She had paused and gripped the wall rail just around the corner out of his line of sight. 

Holy shit, he meant it. 

Like, really meant it. 

Fuck.

She thought for a half-second about turning around, walking back into the room and trying again, but what would she say? “I love you too.” She did. Of course she did. She’d been on the on ramp to saying all of it and more in his hallway this past summer, before the goddamn bee. 

But they’d been to the ends of the earth together, and then they’d argued. And Diana had complicated things, and they had been reassigned. And now both of them were taut with a hundred things they weren’t saying. So for him to say it now, it took her by surprise. She wasn’t prepared to answer back. But. Fuck. He really meant it.

This is the phrase that had settled into a rhythm in her brain on the walk out to the car and is tormenting her all the way home as she determines, he hadn’t actually been on any painkillers. 

A warmth has lodged itself in her right hipbone, and is spreading from where the back of his knuckles had lingered against her the entire time she stood at his bedside. She vacillates between blushing furiously with embarrassment at her reply, “Oh brother?” Shit! What were you thinking? and a twisting sensation in her stomach when she remembers the way he had called her back to the side of the bed. He had fixed her firmly in his gaze and his voice had deepened as he did his best to make her believe what he said. 

That should have been the giveaway. For all the implausible things he has tried to convince her of, he has never tried like this. There’s always been a gimmick and a slide show. Now, his simple gravity upends her.

What are they going to do? Add this to the pile of unspoken things between them, the ballast of which is now threatening to capsize their entire relationship? And she’s still angry at him for the way he had expected her to change after Antarctica, as if he’d had finally won and her conversion was the prize. 

But moments ago, she had lived in a universe where she never hadn’t heard him say I love you. Hadn’t even expected him to say it, ever. And now, she lives in a universe where he did. A universe where he has finally, finally said something to name their increasingly intractable devotion. She blushes again, a happy split second before the cold wash of regret about her response returns and douses the warmth of the memory.

She parks the car absentmindedly and finds herself in her apartment, suddenly desperate for a friend other than Mulder she could call at this time of night. And not her mother. She can’t tell her mother about this. But she needs to analyze it, hash it out, figure out how much damage she has done, figure out what to do next. Preferably with a girlfriend over several stiff drinks. 

How many years into knowing him had she let everyone else slip away? What was the moment she made the decision that created this universe where he has become absolutely everything? How many moments like this has she had -- the late night in her kitchen, after a drive home from a hospital, when she stares at her phone longingly? Sometimes it rings and sometimes it doesn’t. It feels like thousands, as if every version of every story she’s caught in boils down to these waiting moments.

Tonight, it doesn’t ring. She doesn’t think it will. She crawls into bed not expecting to sleep. But after a long time, she finally does.

*****  
There is a universe where Scully decides to let this blow over, where she greets him innocently on Monday morning, everything back to their status quo. But now she imagines that universe as a ghost ship, sailing lifelessly through dark, silent seas. She wants the lights and the music, the chase and the jump, the kiss, and the knockout.

She gets up at her weekday alarm at 5:30. She showers, throws on a black sweater and jeans and is back at the hospital by 7. He won’t be expecting her attention at the hospital for such a benign set of injuries. The overnight was just a precaution, to make sure there were no residual effects from his apparent blow to the head. She stops for coffee and donuts on the way.

He’s still asleep when she settles into the chair next to his bed, an endearing trickle of drool cascading from his open mouth into his hospital pillow. Looking over him, she feels her heart clench with what until yesterday she would have only considered protectiveness, a sense of responsibility, affection. She smiles and leans back in her chair, watching.

“What are you doing here?” His voice croaks as his eyes squeeze open.

“Brought you some donuts,” she nods toward the waxy paper sack and steaming styrofoam cup on the nightstand. “How’d you sleep?”

“Okay,” he eyes her with suspicion as he presses the buttons that angle the bed upward. He clears his throat and brushes some hair back from where it’s matted against his forehead. “This isn’t, um, our standard discharge procedure, Scully. What’s up?”

Scully racks her brain for some plausible excuse before settling on the old standby of medical expertise. “I wanted to double check your meds,” she hesitates. “I wasn’t sure they had accounted for your time underwater.”

Mulder looks at her with a raised eyebrow, waiting for more. “Donuts?”

“There’s a new shop around the corner from my place,” Scully lies, “seemed like the thing to do.”

“No other reason?” Mulder asks as the fuzziness of yesterday’s memory sharpens into clarity and he understands why she’s back.

“Well,” Scully pauses. She has an idea of how to proceed but isn’t sure she can pull it off. “I also needed some advice.”

“Advice?” Mulder straightens up, fully awake now.

“Yeah, advice.” Scully fidgets with her hands before forcing herself to meet his eyes. “A friend told me something recently, and I’m afraid my response might have hurt their feelings.”

“A friend?” Mulder looks slightly wounded, but plays along.

“Yes, a good friend.” She looks at him. “A dear friend.”

Mulder nods.

“They said something and I thought they were joking.” She sighs, shy. “I realized later they weren’t.”

“And you need my advice about what, exactly?” Mulder decides to make her work for it.

“How do I apologize?” Scully stares at him earnestly, swallowing the nervous lump that has formed in her throat. 

“I guess it depends on how good of a friend this is,” he says. “And on what you wish you would have said instead.”

“It’s my best friend.” She reaches her hand and covers his where it lays on the edge of the bed. “And I wish I’d have told him, me too.”

Mulder smiles and turns his hand over to interlace his fingers in hers. But Scully continues.

“But I also need this friend to know that I don’t know what that means for me right now.” She looks down slightly, avoiding his gaze. “That I’m not sure what to do about it. And I was really surprised by what he said. I wasn’t prepared.”

Mulder runs his thumb across the top of her hand. “I’d bet your friend surprised himself too,” he suggests. “I bet he didn’t really think it all through anyway. It was just probably something he couldn’t keep to himself anymore.”

Scully nods and squeezes his hand. “What do you think this friend would want me to do next?” she asks.

“I think he’d want you to know he can wait.”

“Wait for what?” Scully raises her eyebrows.

“Wait until you know what you want to do about it,” Mulder is reassuring, still circling his thumb gently on the back of her hand. “I think he would tell you, he’s not going anywhere.”

Scully nods again and swallows, her eyes glistening slightly. “Okay.” She croaks in a whisper, smiling.

“Now, I think I was promised donuts?” Mulder grins, jerking his head toward the paper sack.

“You were,” Scully smiles and opens the bag, another universe shaping itself into being as she hands him a Boston Creme.


End file.
